Greek Medicine 127 



working on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring to extend 

 the Hippocratic experience. 



Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest 

 of the sixteenth-century surgeons, the lovable and loving 

 Ambroise Pare (1510-1590), though he was, as he himself 

 humbly confessed, an ignorant man knowing neither Latin nor 

 Greek, can be shown to have derived much from the works of 

 antiquity, which were circulating in translation in his day and 

 were thus filtering down to the unlearned. 



Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral 

 part in the medical instruction of the universities from their 

 commencement in the thirteenth century. The first Greek 

 text of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited 

 by no less a hand than that of Frangois Rabelais. With the 

 further recovery of the Greek texts and preparation of better 

 translations, these became almost the sole mode of instruction 

 during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The translators 

 became legion and their competence varied. One highly skilled 

 translator, however, is of special interest to English readers. 

 Thomas Linacre (1460 ?-i524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor 

 to the Princess Mary, founder and first president of the College 

 of Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and 

 one of the earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating 

 of the English humanists, spent much energy on this work of 

 translation for which his abilities peculiarly fitted him. He 

 was responsible for no less than six important works of Galen, of 

 which one, the De temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie, 

 printed at Cambridge in 1521, was among the earliest books im- 

 pressed in that town and is said to be the first printed in England 

 for which Greek types were used. It has been honoured by 

 reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such works as these, 

 purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century and more, 

 and were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic 

 products sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new 



